Busi­nesses ad­vised to adopt labour broking

A LO­CAL labour and in­dus­trial con­sul­tant has ad­vised busi­nesses to adopt labour broking as a way of en­sur­ing se­cu­rity in terms of pay­ment of work­ers.

Labour broking is where a third party con­ducts or pro­vides work­ers to a com­pany to ren­der a ser­vice or per­form work for a re­ward the same way in­sur­ers pro­vide cover for ser­vices. Speak­ing at a re­cent Em­ploy­ers Con­fed­er­a­tion of Zim­babwe (EMCOZ) an­nual congress here, Mr Mem­ory Nguwi, who is di­rec­tor of In­dus­trial Psy­chol­ogy Con­sul­tants in Harare, said busi­nesses in other coun­tries such as Namibia were pur­su­ing the prac­tice as it has ben­e­fits for both the em­ployer and worker.

“Labour broking is new but the take up rate es­pe­cially by those with work­ers on con­tract is ris­ing,” said Mr Nguwi.

He said through labour broking, com­pa­nies would avoid clash­ing with work­ers over salaries.

He said legally, there was noth­ing wrong with pur­su­ing labour broking as it has worked in Namibia and South Africa.

“In the past few months a lot of busi­nesses have been tak­ing this route. Cur­rently, there is no law which pro­hibits labour broking and so, un­til some­one de­cides to go to court com­pa­nies can pur­sue this route. It helps em­ploy­ers man­age cost of labour and com­pa­nies would adopt this just like in in­sur­ance, you will just be pass­ing risk to a third party,’ he said.

The congress, which was of­fi­cially opened by Vice Pres­i­dent Em­mer­son Mnan­gagwa, was at­tended by of­fi­cials from Min­istries of In­dus­try and Com­merce and Pub­lic Ser­vice, Labour and So­cial Wel­fare as well as from trade unions and em­ploy­ment coun­cils.

Con­tribut­ing in the dis­cus­sions, par­tic­i­pants chal­lenged work­ers to ded­i­cate them­selves to in­crease pro­duc­tiv­ity.

“The ques­tion is what value are you adding to the com­pany as an em­ployee? Work­ers should give their best. If we can get this done, we would have reached a par­a­digm shift nec­es­sary for re­vival of the econ­omy,” said a par­tic­i­pant.

An­other called for ‘ part fixed and part vari­ables’ kind of salaries and wages.

“When we de­sign wages and salaries can we move to part vari­able and part fixed and EMCOZ should pur­sue this is­sue. Part fixed will pro­tect the em­ployee while the vari­able will en­sure they get paid more when an or­gan­i­sa­tion’s pro­duc­tiv­ity rises,” said a par­tic­i­pant.

Labour lawyer Mr Rodgers Mat­sikidze said the coun­try needs to be con­sis­tent with its labour laws. He said amend­ments that were made to the labour law last year were hastily ef­fected hence the new law has nu­mer­ous short­com­ings. — @ncubeleon